That, and the fact that this topic exists and there are surely several thousand people who think about the matter at hand in a similar way [i.e. "black metal is srs bsns"] should be enough to discount such a claim.

Listen to what is good, ignore everything else.

It directly correlates to finding what is good. The inane kiddies who think 3 chords and a PC makes them uber kvlt black metal gods have so much shit clogging up the genre, finding a good band amidst it all is like digging through your septic tank for a spec of gold dust.

You eliminate the parasites, and the number of crap being churned out drops. Once that happens, all of these aberrations will stop being praised, and the truly talented works will be more easily discernible, leading to a rise in the standard of quality.

But until then, we'll have to settle for being told every overly distorted; strummed out farce that some dweeb puts on his myspace, is the new Burzum-meets-Darkthrone played like Immortal-meets-Dissection.

This is why most bands that start with the idea "We are going to be an X metal band." rather than coming up with an idea and letting the method follow are usually uninspired boring.

Having played with several people who use this as their philosophy, it's completely true. Instead of wanting to hear things I'd written with my own sort of vision and honesty; because they weren't "fast", they wanted to hear "thrashy" or "fast" or "heavy" things. As a result, everything that met their criteria was bland and left little to no room for me to expand upon.

I actually talked with one of these people recently, and he showed me a "track" from his "new band". It was 6 minutes long and seemed to incorporate every single staple of 80's heavy and speed metal. It was clear whoever put it together just put things there for the sake of a clean section, a chug, a gallop, solo, etc. It seemed so sterile and lifeless, I actually had assumed everything but the guitar was digital.

The worst part is, people like this seem to make up most of the metal "musicians" out there today. If it isn't being "a thrash band", it's power death black classical folk viking pagan metal. Nobody seems to have a vision of their own, so they construct one with the ideas and techniques of others.

Many years ago, we read members of Judas Priest and even Metallica claim that heavy metal is based in classical music, and we laughed. "Classical music was for wusses," we thought. "And clearly nothing on Master of Puppets or Screaming For Vengeance could be mistaken for Mozart or Beethoven. Sure, guitar wankers like Yngwie Malmsteen and Tony MacAlpine paid homage to dudes like Paganini and Tchaikovsky, but their music wasn't really metal. Yeah, it was loud, but it was also unlistenably pretentious. Then came the Internet and a couple of musicians from Taiwan and we were forced to admit that maybe Priest and Metallica knew what they were talking about, after all.

I literally cannot find words to express the brazen idiocy of the person who wrote this.

This could explain the past few days I've spent trying to translate Vatha's GuitarPro file of Cries From A Restless Soul (from the "Metal Score Project" thread) into something by a string quartet, even though I don't know the first thing about playing a violin.

Once making a complete ass out of yourself became a no-no, the idiots started to dress up all their malformed thoughts with exotic adjectives and prefixes, as if those words made them anything more than they already are: crap.

This seems to be the case for nearly everything I can think of, that gets exposure to "the mainstream". For some reason, the 90's were just the pinnacle of cheese and over-saturation, which led those arteries to get so clogged with bullshit that the entity as a whole ended up dying. Once that last breath was heaved, the maggots; the groups, acts, bands, writers, etc that we see today, started to infest the corpse - feeding off it, and at the same time destroying what once was.

Naturally there are still people who "defend the faith", but you'll notice they are not worming around in the husks of the great ones who came before.

I think some Sacramentum pieces would work, especially When Night Surrounds Me:

Under the mighty wings of blackness,I deny my earthly existence.Embraced by thy nocturnal paradise,I will forever belong to the night.

It's slightly more personal; like the rest of the album, but still carries the same meaning. Of course, it could be attributed to how Sacramentum wove their works - I used the "verse" of The Vision and The Voice as my own mantra, unknowingly, for a while.

Half of these posts disguise their personal likes and dislikes as "better" and "worse", which is down-right childish. The only thing that is missing is the explanation that one thing is better than another "because it rocks".

If you look for a sound made by other people, but conceptualized in your own head - you're never going to find it. And if the production, tone and mixing are all that matters, it seems you'd be best off downloading a sound-editing program and either working out your own, or editing currently existing things. I had an acquaintance that would manipulate or remix songs to be more pleasing to him. You'll destroy the integrity and; at least with some albums, the unique way the music is presented... but I suppose the individual interpretations are what matter in the end.

It's the rise of the mutants. And the most extreme mutant of all is civilization as we know it, "consuming the planet that once used to nourish it", to semi-paraphrase Demilich.

You say there's freedom within our nature,Well, I don't think you understand;Mother Earth has fallen to Mother Man.The air, the sea, the grass, the trees;The nemesis is the major, fearless leader;Mother Man.

im good enough on bass to be in a band, im currently in high school and i am going to do a 8 minute improvised solo

but after about 6 minutes or so a couple of things a play start to sound similar, so has anyone got any ideas

i dont care if its finger picking, picking with a pick, slap bass whatever just give me some help

"Learning to play" is the best tip I can give. This kind of thought is what is currently crippling most musicians.

"I need to be able to play [so and so] because I am going to be doing [so and so]." I don't see why you would set a goal that you know you can't reach, or make a display of skill that you don't possess.

If you just went along, actually practicing (something a lot of people do not do), and played things you felt comfortable doing this wouldn't be a problem.

This seems closest to the truth, it's like marijuana, heroin or cocaine. The people with a true weakness of spirit or body will become 'addicted', but those with self-control can use it once and leave it at that.

Unfortunately, for some reason being a weak-willed bottom feeder is not reason enough to be pampered by society, so they are 'addicts'. And as soon as that lost its punch, 'addiction' is now a 'disease'.